Typical privilege escalation, CSP and Rails security reading #11

Last week I came across this typical privilege escalation vulnerability. This type of problem happened in about 30% of the Rails apps that I reviewed. It goes like this:
  • 2 users have access to 2 different projects
  • 1 resource in each project (web hooks in this case)
  • User 1 and 2 can access /projects/1/hooks/1 and /projects/2/hooks/1 even though one of them shouldn’t
  • That’s because the resource controller uses ProjectHook.find(params[:hook_id]), so it’s not scoped to the project.
 Let’s go and fix similar problems. But now for something completely different:

Only .37% of the top million Alexa sites use a Content-Security-Policy. Is it time to start implementing one?

Same-site Cookies

New: Same-Site cookies are sent only when using a web app directly, not through a request from a third-party website. With them, CSRF attacks won’t be possible anymore, because a request from a different site won’t be as a signed in user anymore. This is supported in the newest Chrome and Opera versions (and was before through general browser settings).


A cheesy name for multiple vulnerabilities in the popular ImageMagick (e.g. through rmagick, paperclip): Remote Code Execution, delete and move files, SSRF, read local files.

The page we’re linking to with target=’_blank’ gains partial access to the source page via the window.opener object.

Let’s Encrypt is not beta anymore.

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